I-Corps: Searchable, Extendible Data Archive for Neuroscience and Physiology Research

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The broader impact/commercial potential of this I-Corps project is the development of a technology that allows scientists to share data, analyses, and analysis software programs in neuroscience fields. The creation of a searchable and accessible archive of neuroscience and physiology data and analyses will allow academics, industry scientists to examine and re-analyze this data. This re-examination may lead to meta-analyses and new observations that are not possible today due to the barriers of reading primary data and analyses from other labs. Scientists can pilot their analyses and hypotheses on accessible existing data, and scientists and companies can develop tools that can operate on data from many studies. Data sets will be available to teachers for creation of educational material and tutorials. This I-Corps project is based on the development of a software tool that allows an experimenter or analyst to quickly express the file formats and data organization type as a set of parameters. Humans and computer programs can then search and retrieve information from the data at many levels of granularity: from raw data to analyses and analyses of analyses. This technology may be extended to a cloud service that allows users to post their published data in a manner that is easily searchable and usable. Further, the architecture may allow interested third parties to re-analyze or develop meta-analyses that are also searchable and extendible. This archive may enable neuroscientists and physiologists to share data, analyses, and software tools, potentially unleashing a new era of discovery and robustness in science.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.